Credit: City University of Hong KongA research study team has revealed a microwave photonic chip that significantly improves analog electronic signal processing, using 1,000 times the speed and greater energy performance than existing processors.”To attend to these challenges, our group established a MWP system that combines ultrafast electro-optic (EO) conversion with low-loss, multifunctional signal processing on a single integrated chip, which has actually not been achieved in the past,” discussed Professor Wang.Such efficiency is made it possible for by an integrated MWP processing engine based on a thin-film lithium niobate (LN) platform capable of carrying out multi-purpose processing and computation jobs of analog signals. LN is referred to as the “silicon of photonics” for its significance to photonics, similar to silicon in microelectronics.Their work opens up a brand-new research field, i.e., LN microwave photonics, enabling microwave photonics chips with compact sizes, high signal fidelity, and low latency; it likewise represents a chip-scale analog electronic processing and computing engine.Reference: “Integrated lithium niobate microwave photonic processing engine” by Hanke Feng, Tong Ge, Xiaoqing Guo, Benshan Wang, Yiwen Zhang, Zhaoxi Chen, Sha Zhu, Ke Zhang, Wenzhao Sun, Chaoran Huang, Yixuan Yuan and Cheng Wang, 28 February 2024, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/ s41586-024-07078-9The papers very first authors are Feng Hanke and Ge Tong (EE undergraduate).
